Drunk in its stale airFor two hundred years.Fettered in mind and body,The soul, the safe escape

To let me breathe the criesOf my heart singingTears of mel-an-choly.

The tears flow free todayWashing the stains of bloodAnd sweat in brotherhood.

Raise the curtain then an'Let the world look inOn this promised land --We breathe free today.... almost.

--- Arshad M. Khan

We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.--- Native American proverb

October 5, 2018 (posted October 12, 2018)

Mr. President: The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded the finalization of a special report on the impact of a 1.5 degree Celsius global warming above preindustrial levels. Meeting in Incheon, South Korea (October 1-5), its three working groups of experts and government officials have huddled and jousted to strike a consensus on what will be necessary to restrict warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius when the globe is already up a degree. What will earth be like with this level of warmth and what will happen if we fail?

Two earlier versions (January and June 2018) of the report were depressing to frightening. They were made available for about a month for comment by experts and interested parties. The real problem is a narrow window because human activity in the world emits 40 billion tons of CO2 per year -- about 90 times the emission from volcanoes. At some point, there will be enough in the atmosphere where the 1.5 degree rise will be a foregone conclusion. While guesswork to some extent, it appears we have about 15 years before we exhaust the 'carbon budget'; for a 2C rise the date is 2045.

The tone may have been softened in the second report, but there is 'substantial' certainty the 2 degrees C target of the 2015 Paris Agreement, once considered safe, would be dangerous for humanity. As the agreement also required governments to pursue efforts to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C, the remit to IPCC was to prepare a report comparing the consequences of the two alternatives as well as the feasibility and effort required to limit the rise to the lower figure. The final report (release date Oct 8, 2018) reviews 30,000 publications.

The fact that parts of the earth are already warmer than the 2 degree C figure and the results are observable should be a driver for governments. In the Arctic, for example, where temperatures have risen up to 3 degrees C, the effort has seen chunks of icebergs breaking off and polar bears having difficulty in catching seals because of fewer blowholes -- where they normally wait in ambush. Current temperatures are higher than they ever have been in the past two millennia.

For low-lying Pacific Islands the 1.5C goal is critical for many there would lose habitat and some islands are expected to disappear under the 2C target. The Maldives in the Indian ocean are partly under water, and some Pacific islands have already disappeared as average world sea levels rise by 3 mm a year. Yet Tuvalu has become an exception and its land area, studied from 1971 to 2014, is growing. Eight of its nine atolls are found to be still rising, increasing the "area by 29 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose by twice the global average."

Even so the consequences of the earth already being 1 degree C higher than preindustrial times are apparent in the proliferation of extreme weather events. Unduly powerful hurricanes as in Puerto Rico or Houston, record-breaking forest fires in the U.S. and Australia, monsoons in South India this year that in Kerala have been the worst in a century, and the record temperatures in northern Europe are a few examples.

The IPCC discussions were extended to Saturday (October 6). Saudi Arabia, heavily dependent on the sale of fossil fuels, presumably is arguing for caveats like costs and even further softening of the language.

There is also the intriguing possibility of extracting CO2 out of the atmosphere. Direct air capture, or DAC as the technology is known, has recently received a new boost as costs have dropped. Experts believe under $100 a ton make it a realistic option.